Marilee Kemp’s letters

Marilee Kemp’s letters are both a surviving record of her relationship with the young Rabo Karabekian and the evidence of her emergence as a writer. The seventy-eight letters she sent between 1927 and 1933 begin in a life in which she is isolated and disregarded; read together years later, they show her gaining confidence, expressive range, and self-respect through the act of addressing one devoted reader.

The Collection and Its Preservation

Rabo can count the letters because he still possesses them. They are kept in the library, bound in a hand-tooled leather volume with a slipcase. Edith gave him the binding and slipcase for their tenth wedding anniversary, making the collection not merely an archive of an earlier relationship but also an object preserved within his later married life.

The letters’ survival allows Rabo to measure change across the series rather than rely on a general memory of Marilee. Their development is legible in the writing itself: each letter, he says, is deeper, more expressive, more confident, and more self-respecting than the one before. The volume thus holds both the record of a connection and a visible account of a writer’s growth.

Marilee’s Circumstances and the Letters’ Audience

The correspondence begins against Marilee’s isolation in Dan Gregory’s household. Rabo’s mother recognizes that Marilee must be lonely. Gregory keeps her there because she is beautiful and sometimes uses her as a model, but he does not treat her as a business assistant or value her opinions. He excludes her from his dinner parties, trips, shows, restaurant outings, other people’s parties, and introductions to his famous friends. The letters come from a life in which she is physically present in Gregory’s house yet denied participation in much of its social world.

Years afterward, Circe Berman reads the letters without first asking whether Rabo regards them as private. She is struck by them, describing a scorned and abused woman discovering that she is a great writer. Rabo confirms the essential point: the letters’ increasing depth and assurance make Marilee’s development visible on the page. When Circe asks about her education, he answers that Marilee had completed only one year of high school. The contrast between that limited formal schooling and the growing power of the writing sharpens the significance of the achievement the correspondence records.

Circe offers a different account from Rabo’s father of what Marilee wanted from the letters. His father saw them as promises that could not be fulfilled; Circe says Marilee was using Rabo as an audience. In her view, a writer needs someone who listens closely, and one reader can be enough. She points to the improvement in Marilee’s handwriting and vocabulary and to the expanding range of subjects she found to discuss once she knew Rabo was attending to every word. The letters’ intimacy is therefore also a condition of their literary development: they give Marilee a particular reader before whom she can become more assured.

The Father’s Reading and Its Limits

When Rabo is about fifteen, he comes home from school to find his father at the oilcloth-covered kitchen table rereading Marilee’s letters, stacked before him. Rabo does not treat this as an invasion of privacy: he considers the letters family property, in a household he describes as consisting of only two people. He also likens them to bonds or gilt-edged securities, imagining that their value might mature and eventually enable him to care for his father.

That financial metaphor reflects the family’s precarious circumstances. The Luma County Savings and Loan Association has failed, wiping out his father’s savings; the building that the father once owned has been foreclosed, leaving him a tenant in the upstairs home. The shop on the first floor is vacant, and its machinery has been sold at auction. Against that loss, the letters seem to promise a future resource. The father’s reading turns on whether those promises have any real value.

He concludes that Marilee has promised Rabo everything but has nothing to give, comparing her to Vartan Mamigonian, the Armenian swindler who had cheated Rabo’s parents in Cairo. He says he has read the fine print. As he sees it, Marilee’s earliest letters rely on references to what Gregory says, feels, and wants Rabo to know; after the third letter, those references disappear. The father takes that change as proof that the writer is a nobody borrowing Gregory’s reputation in order to attach herself to someone who might matter. His judgment catches the early dependence on Gregory’s name, but it does not anticipate the growth that Rabo later identifies in the letters or the writing Circe admires.

From Promises to a Writer’s Voice

The novel places two readings of the collection in productive tension. Rabo’s father treats the letters like financial instruments and searches them for promises that can be redeemed. Circe instead attends to what the writing becomes. For her, the decisive fact is not whether Marilee can deliver what she appeared to promise, but that the letters themselves show her discovering and exercising a literary ability. Rabo’s later judgment supports that reading: the series gains depth and confidence letter by letter.

Circe’s account also reframes the correspondence’s apparent purpose. Rabo had believed Marilee was describing city scenes because he might want to paint them. Circe suggests that the descriptions gave Marilee a reason to write to the person who was actually reading her closely. Her principle is that writers should write for one person, not for an abstract public or a crowd. The letters embody that principle within the story: their audience of one is not a limitation on the writing but the relationship through which Marilee’s voice develops. They endure as more than testimony to loneliness or as presumed promises to Rabo; they are a record of a woman becoming a writer in the act of being read.